With its magnificent views and captivating history, it’s not hard to see Why dean and sarah berry fell in love with this run-down folly in newport. after relocating from london, they discovered that restoring a local landmark to its former glory is no mean feat.

A gothic turret of dark limestone perched on a Monmouthshire summit, Dean and Sarah Berry’s eighteenth-century folly tower has a touch of the fairytale castle. And for Sarah, it was love at first sight. They were living in London at the time – their little boy, Ruben, was just two weeks’ old – but all reason went out of the window as they approached the threshold of Kemeys Folly. ‘Dean looked at my face and said, “we’re buying it aren’t we?”,’ remembers Sarah. ‘And why not? If you had the chance to own something like this, why wouldn’t you?’

The views alone are enough to justify her passion. From its lofty vantage point you can look west over the Usk Valley towards Pontypool and the Black Mountains; to the north, you can see the Severn Estuary and, beyond, the Bristol Channel. The history, too, is captivating. A former hunting lodge, the folly was built in 1712 by local landowner George Kemeys, it was struck by lightning in the late 1890s and partially rebuilt as a home in the early 1900s. Nonetheless, there was more than one good reason to walk away.

Though habitable, the building was a mess of damp stonework and dodgy twentieth-century extensions – the latter, a poor attempt at matching the folly with rendered concrete and fake castellations. A previous owner had repointed the stonework with inappropriate cement mortar and much of the interior was waterlogged. There had been planning consent to replace the a dodgy extensions, but the consent had lapsed. And though the property came with 26 acres and a nineteenth-century stable block, everything demanded attention.

‘Dean was initially unconvinced,’ says Sarah. ‘All he could see was the amount of work that needed doing. What I saw was an opportunity. We both grew up in nearby Newport, and we’d always thought we’d come home one day. I just knew we had to do it – instinct took over.’ A couple of months after buying the property, Dean landed a banking job in Bristol – a 40-minute commute across the Severn Bridge. ‘The timing was perfect,’ adds Sarah.

The transformation of Kemeys Folly kicked off the new series of Grand Designs, with a tricky marriage of historic building restoration and twenty- first-century construction – the two aspects melded together to form one extraordinary family home. With Sarah taking the role of project manager, the programme closely followed the intense process: demolishing the old extensions, remodelling the Grade-II listed folly and, finally, building the transparent L-shaped wing, which now wraps around two sides of the tower, forming a rectangular block of open-plan living space to the north, and a curved limb of glass and steel to the south.

According to Sarah, the Grand Designs television crew were a little disappointed by the lack of high drama. ‘It all went pretty smoothly,’ she says. Even the planning application sailed through without a hitch. Ditto, the listed building consent (a necessity of working with a Grade-II listed structure).

But the project wasn’t entirely problem free. From buying the raw material in 2005, it took nearly three years to complete the build. The first year, the building was more or less mothballed during the wait for planning consent.

Working with Cardiff-based architects, Davies Sutton, the couple submitted the scheme for the new extension, making their three-storey folly part of a five-bedroom house, fuelled by an eco-friendly biomass boiler. A procession of specialists came and went – among them, a planning consultant, a conservation officer and an archaeologist (to check the site for antiquities before demolition). In 2006, the Berrys left London for a rented house 10 minutes down the road and, that summer, they started the painstaking job of repointing the exterior of the folly with lime mortar. But due to problems finding a sympathetic contractor, work didn’t start on the new-build section until January 2008.

There was also a problem with the foundations, and they had to go down further than they originally thought, and later, there was a delay with the steel frame for the curved wing (which didn’t quite fit). ‘The new extension was a complicated build,’ explains Sarah. ‘We are so exposed up here, the steel and the slab had to be very high spec – and building a curve is never easy. We kept saying, “do we really need the curve?” We knew it was going to cost us time and money, which, of course, it did.’

Meanwhile, the fairytale folly presented an entirely different set of headaches. Under the conditions of listed building consent, they were required to retain specific features – a stone staircase that spirals up to the roof, and some delicate eighteenth-century plasterwork, including a hunting-theme frieze on the ground floor. Some of the period windows had, at some stage been replaced with unsightly uPVC, and these had to be removed to make way for steel-framed, leaded windows, custom-made to match the originals.

A listed plaster ceiling – on the first floor, which is now Dean and Sarah’s bedroom – had turned black with mould during two years of waiting for attention. ‘It needed a massive amount of restoration,’ says Sarah. ‘We had to replace three sections – two of which fell down during building work. The decorators took weeks to get to grips with it.’

The completed building is a curious but consolidated mix of old and new, the now magnificent master bedroom is pure eighteenth-century folly, though its attached bathroom suite and upper-deck roof terrace form part of the shiny new extension. The folly’s top floor (which has two bedrooms, including Ruben’s seaside-themed nursery) has been gutted and remodelled. The hallway and stairwell are more or less as Kemeys intended, but the old hunting lodge’s ground-floor salon (converted into a library-cum-cinema room), is now accessed via the vast glassy living space which has become the heart of the Berrys’ new home. The amazing curved wing houses a guest bedroom, study and playroom.

Since the family moved in in December 2008 (‘a Christmas behind schedule,’ says Sarah), the place has been furnished and dressed to impress.

In the original building, the overall look is lush fabrics, dark wood, gunmetal carpets, a touch of crystal and silver, and the odd dash of modern-baroque. The clean lines of the extension include simple ceramics, glass, leather and chrome, with a glossy wood-look kitchen and the odd splash of vivid wallpaper for a dramatic look.

‘I wanted to create a style that would tie the two buildings together,’ says Sarah, who has studied interior design since leaving her old job in PR in London. ‘The older, more ornate folly has a warmer, more glamorous feel to it, whereas the extension looks fresher, more monochrome. But although they are quite different externally, I wanted to make sure that the two buildings somehow spoke to each other internally.’

There are still a few areas that need attention (the folly still doesn’t much like the rain), but Sarah admits to being rather sad that her love-affair project is all but over. ‘I’ve lived and breathed this place for so long, it feels like a section of my life has come to an end,’ she confesses. ‘I suppose that’s partly why we agreed to appear on Grand Designs – we thought the folly deserved its little moment of glory.’

Kevin’s last Word…

It’s easy to say of sarah and dean that in coming back to the city they grew up in they were flaunting their success. But never underestimate how difficult or risky it is to build something really good on this planet. The adventure of commissioning an original piece of architecture is a journey into the unknown in which you place your trust in the hands of an architect. not a trip you want to make in front of your friends perhaps. sarah and dean could so easily have bought a ready-made house, but instead chose the double-jeopardy card: a bespoke contemporary building and the restoration of a local landmark. ever-confident, ever-ambitious, ever-industrious, they turned fortune in their direction and the resulting building is a fascinating hybrid, sensitively designed by a first-class practice, davies sutton.